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links are to pre-publication versions of the papers
for links to published versions, see the publications page

"Negligence and
Social Self-Governance" in tbd volume, ed. Al Mele

Negligenceandotherinstancesofapparentlynon-volitionalculpabilityareanimportantpartofourresponsibilitypractices. Weblamepeopleforfailingtotakeintoaccountsomeimportantmoralconsiderationindecidingwhattodo, forfailingtoremembersomecommitment, andforfailingtorecognizesociallyandmorallysalientfeaturesofasituation. Indeed, suchfaultsaremorecommonthanexplicitlyintendedwrongdoing. However, theseinstancesofapparentculpabilityaredifficulttoaccommodateonmanyphilosophicalaccountsofmoralresponsibility, especiallythosethatemphasizeanotionofvolitionalcontrol. Failurestobringtomindrelevantconsiderations, failuresofrecall, andfailuresofrecognitionmoregenerallyarenotalwaysmattersofdirectvolitionalcontrol. Thispaperproposesanaccountofculpabilitythatdoesnotrunafouloftheproblemsthatbesetordinarycontrol-basedaccountsofresponsibility, whileretainingtheideathatpeopleinsuchcasescouldhavecompliedwiththedemandsofmorality. It
also argues that the relationship of capacitarian
reasons-responsiveness accounts to attributionist
approaches to moral responsibility has been
misunderstood, to the detriment of all.

"Latinx Philosophy" draft
Latinx philosophy is philosophical work substantively concerned
with Latinxs, including the moral, social, political, epistemic,
and linguistic significance of Latinxs and their experiences.
Although its emergence as a distinctive, self-identified field
is relatively recent, Latinx philosophy includes a substantial
body of work that draws from a variety of philosophical
traditions, including critical race theory, Latina feminist
philosophy, Latinx and Chicanx Studies, various strands of Latin
American, Continental, analytic, and Africana philosophy, as
well as newly emergent research programs concerned with narrower
ethno-national identities, such as Mexican American philosophy.
This chapter focuses on the nature, history, and recent
developments of Latinx philosophy in the United States. It
discusses current work in Latinx philosophy, the various origins
of Latinx philosophy, disputes about how to understand the
field, and some potential futures for the field. Download "Latinx
Philosophy"

"Reflectivism, Skepticism, and Values" Social Theory and
Practice 44:2 (2018).
John Doris has recently argued against reflectivism, a
view that he finds implausible on empirical grounds. This
paper argues that reflectivism is best construed as a view
about ideal agency, and not as a description of our actual
psychology. The paper goes on to argue that Doris' skepticism
about reflectivism is neither necessary to motivate his own
positive account of responsible agency, nor is it convincing.
Finally, I raise some questions about whether collaborativism—Doris'
intriguing and radical recasting of a broadly deep self
approach to agency—can capture the idea that made deep self
accounts appealing in the first place. Download "Reflectivism, Skepticism, and
Values"

“The Social Constitution of Responsible Agency: Oppression,
Politics, and Moral Ecology" The Social Dimensions of
Responsibility, ed. by Marina Oshana, Katrina
Hitchinson, and Catriona Mackenzie, 2018.
When people are subject to oppression, does that fact undermine
their culpability for wrongdoing? No uncomplicated answer seems
appealing. On the one hand, it can be callous to insist that
someone’s being subject to oppression is never relevant to their
culpability. On the other hand, insisting that oppression always
undermines a person’s culpability seems too forgiving and even
disrespectful. Responsible agency can and does exist under
systematic disadvantage, we might think. The challenge is to
find a way to acknowledge that our agency is socially
constituted, but to do so in a way that allows us to explain why
some psychological configurations rightly underpin our
condemnatory practices while others do not. This paper offers a
framework for thinking about responsibility, especially as it
applies to wrongful action under conditions of oppression. Among
the central claims of this account is that it is a mistake to
think that we can account for culpable wrongdoing in isolation
from the social context and political institutions that shape
our agency. One consequence of this approach is that the moral
ecology of our agency—the circumstances that support and enable
morally valuable forms of agency—becomes of paramount concern if
one is interested in oppression, agency, and moral
responsibility.

A revisionist theory of free will
holds that the correct account of free will is, in some or
another way, at odds with our ordinary understanding of
free will's nature, concept, or associated practices.
Typically, revisionist accounts of free will are presented
as alternatives to eliminativist accounts, which deny that
free will exists, as well as conventional accounts that
hold that neither elimination nor revision is called for
in our understanding of free will's nature, concept, or
associated practices. This essay describes the
motivations, state of play, and ongoing challenges for
revisionist approaches to free will.
Download "Revisionism"

"Manipulation,
Oppression, and the Deep Self" in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences. 2018. This essay
considers various kinds of manipulation cases, including
local, global, dispositional, and situational varieties.
It also argues that sophisticated Deep Self
theories, of the sort exemplified by John Doris'recent
account, run into challenges when it comes to manipulation
cases. In particular, agents with preferences adaptively
formed under oppression present an especially interesting
challenge for Deep Self-style approaches to moral
responsibility. The article considers what options are
available to Doris and others.

“Implicit Bias, Moral Responsibility, and Moral Ecology" Oxford Studies on Agency and
Responsibility, 2017.
Roughly, implicit bias is a partially unconscious and partially
automatic (frequently negative) evaluative tendency directed at
individuals, based on their apparent membership in a socially
salient category or group. There are two main questions this
essay attempts to answer. First, are people morally responsible
for actions that derive from their implicit biases? Second, is
it possible to chart a middle way between the defense of common
sense and the revolutionary import of phenomena like implicit
bias that can sometimes suggest our received views of agency are
mistaken? The view defended here is, respectively, sometimes
yes, and yes. That is, there is an appealing way of thinking
about the blameworthiness of actions caused by implicit bias
that allows us to accommodate some of the radical aspects of the
emerging scientific picture of agency, without entirely
abandoning our commonsense picture of agency. The key is to
recognize how a roughly “ecological” conception of moral agency
can provide us with principled resources for distinguishing when
agents are in circumstances that afford responsibility, and when
they are not. On this approach, the status of social practices
and norms is central for our being morally responsible.

“Contested Terms and Philosophical Debates" Philosophical Studies,
2017. There is a standard set of theoretical options that tend
to be proposed in response to putative errors in ordinary
thinking about some property. The two main options are forms of
either eliminativism or revisionism. Roughly, eliminativism is
the denial that the target property exists, and revisionism is
the view that the property exists, even if people tend to have
false beliefs about it. Recently, Shaun Nichols has proposed a
third option: discretionism. Discretionism is the idea that some
terms have multiple reference conventions, so that it may be
true to say with eliminativists that the property does not
exist, and true to say with revisionists (and others) that the
property does exist. This article explores the viability of
discretionism, and argues that it faces serious difficulties.
Even if the difficulties faced by discretionism can be overcome,
it is unclear that discretionism secures anything beyond what is
already available to standard revisionist views. The article
concludes with some reflections about Nichols’ account of the
bare retributive norm.

“Précis" and "Desert, Responsibility, and Justification" Philosophical Studies,
2015. (The combined content of these
articles is available in pre-publication as "Moral
Responsibility and Desert: Social, Scaffolded, and Revisionist")

The idea of moral responsibility is central to a wide
range of our moral, social, and legal practices, and it
underpins our basic notion of culpability. Yet the idea of
moral responsibility is regarded with considerable
skepticism by researchers and scholars in psychology,
neuroscience, philosophy, and the law. So, it is a social
practice in want of justification. This
article summarizes and extends the account of the
justification of moralized praise, blame, and punishment in
Building Better Beings: A
Theory of Moral Responsibility (Oxford University
Press, 2013). On this account, the normative basis for moral
responsibility depends on the effects that participation in
the practice has upon us. Roughly, responsibility practices
help to make us better people. One advantage of this picture
is that moral responsibility does not require a “spooky” or
mysterious picture of human agency. That is, responsible
agency is compatible with a broadly scientific picture of
the place of humans in nature, even one where psychology and
neuroscience give us reason for thinking that we do not have
the kind of free will that figures in (metaphysical, not
political) libertarian theories.This
article goes on to consider a variety of objections to this
account, including concerns about moral desert and whether
and how we can justify practices of holding one another to
account.

“Responsibility and the Limits of Conversation" Criminal Law and Philosophy
(2016).

The
fundamental nature of responsibility itself—that thing our
blaming and punishing practices purport to reflect—has
recently been the subject of considerable attention by
theorists of criminal law and moral theory. Both legal and
moral theorists have increasingly found a broadly
“communicative” understanding of responsibility to be
especially appealing. According to such accounts, we can
understand the nature of responsibility and its character by
appeal to the idea that responsibility practices are in some
fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative.
Focusing on Michael McKenna's recent "conversational theory of
moral responsibility," the present essay considers a variety
of issues in connections with this family of views, including
(1) the independence of such accounts from notions of free
will and agential capacity, (2) the underlying theory of
exemptions and powers required for responsible agency, and (3)
whether there are alternative ways of understanding or
extending the communicative idea at the core of such accounts.
I argue that communicative accounts, and the conversational
model in particular, focus our attention on important and
under-appreciated elements of our responsibility practices.
However, we do well to adopt an even more social conception of
responsibility, albeit in the vein of conversational theories.

Libertarianism about free
will is the view that we have free will, and that our having
it is incompatible with causal determinism. This view is
sometimes held to underpin moral and criminal responsibility,
as well as retributive punishment. In its contemporary forms,
it is standardly presented as compatible with a broadly
scientific picture of the world. This paper argues that there
is good reason to think that libertarianism about free will is
not a product of disinterested reasoning about the
requirements of free will, responsibility, or retributive
punishment. Instead, both empirical and conceptual
considerations suggest that libertarianism is largely a
product of motivated reasoning by theists, i.e., believers in
the existence of God. This essay develops the case for that
conclusion and considers its consequences.

Our aim is to show how,
despite its considerable attractions, Leiter’s brand of Legal
Realism cannot fulfill an important practical task for which
we reasonably seek to develop a theory of law: providing an
account of law as a potential source of guidance. Central to
our discussion is the idea that there are diverse interests we
might have in a theory of law. For example, one reason to
develop an account of law is roughly descriptive. That is, we
might seek to explain the nature of legal practices as such
from an outsider's perspective and to illuminate how and why
law functions as it does. We might even hope that such an
account could enable us to predict judgments about cases. A
different reason for developing a theory of law might be
characterized as prescriptive. Among prescriptive approaches,
one view of the function of legal theorizing is to offer
guidance to those concerned to adhere to the law. A
prescriptive account of that sort would, for example, help a
judge decide what ruling the law requires in a given case.
While Legal Realism may adequately serve our descriptive
interests, it is far less clear that it adequately addresses a
reasonable practical interest we can have for a theory of law,
i.e., providing guidance for those interested in adhering to
the law. We then consider whether this shortcoming is best
understood as a serious internal flaw to Legal Realism or
whether instead it shows something more general about the
limitations of any unified approach to jurisprudence. We
suggest the latter.

This essay
considers two aspects of Joseph Raz's recent work: (1) his
theory of responsibility, arising out his reflections on
something he calls "our Being in the World," and (2) the
methodological presumptions that guide his account. On the
matter of responsibility, his notion of "domains of secure
competence" is suggestive but unclear. Natural regimentations
of the idea suggest a host of problems in the specification of
competence, and whether the notion is to be understood
subjectively or third-personally. On the matter of
methodology, Raz's approach gives rise to some serious
concerns, including (1) whether armchair philosophical
reflection is the best way to generate an account, as he aims
to, of essential features of experience, and (2) how to square
his approach with accounts of responsibility, normativity, and
rationality rooted in non-experiential but predictive and
explanatorily valuable accounts of these matters.

"If Free
Will Doesn't Exist, Then Neither Does Water" in Exploring the Illusion of Free
Will and Moral Responsibility (2013).

In recent years, a number
of prominent scientists (e.g., Haggard, Montague, Bargh, Cohen
and Greene, Cashmore, etc.) have argued that their particular
disciplines, or science in general, shows the non-existence of
free will. These claims are frequently demonstrably false or
too hasty, given the way any attempt to settle the issue
requires substantive commitments about disputed philosophical
issues. This essay focuses on three recurring difficulties for
scientific free will skeptics. First, despite frequent appeals
to determinism in the work of scientists, it is unclear that
determinism is more than a theoretical aspiration in many
scientific fields. Second, scientific skeptics too quickly
dismiss compatibilism as a definitional gambit, rather than a
position that has to be addressed before skepticism carries
the day. Third, the powers that constitute free will are
plausibly high-level, multiply realizable properties that
resist straightforward reduction to the properties that figure
in many sciences. The upshot is that those who are attracted
to scientific skepticism about free will are better served by
adopting some form of revisionism about free will.

"How to
Solve the Problem of Free Will" in The Philosophy of Free Will (2013).

This paper
outlines one way of thinking about the problem of free will,
some general reasons for dissatisfactions with traditional
approaches to solving it, and some considerations in favor of
pursuing a broadly revisionist solution to it. If you are
looking for a student-friendly introduction to revisionist
theorizing about free will, this is probably the thing to look
at.

"Situationism and Moral
Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments" in Decomposing the Will (2013)

Many prominent
accounts of free will and moral responsibility make use of the
idea that agents can be responsive to reasons. Call such
theories "Reasons" accounts. This chapter considers the
tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social
psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity
literature. The first half of the chapter argues that Reasons
accounts are genuinely threatened by results in contemporary
psychology. The second half argues that these threats can
largely be met, but that doing so requires abandoning a suite
of familiar assumptions and expectations about responsible
agency and Reasons accounts in particular. The chapter goes on
to advance a new account of responsible agency that
accommodates a variety of worries about situationism and
automaticity.

"Why the Luck Problem Isn't" in Philosophical Issues (2012) The Luck Problem is frequently regarded as one
of the most serious difficulties for libertarian accounts of
free will. This paper argues that the Luck Problem is either a
problem for compatibilists too, or else it is not a problem
for either libertarians or compatibilists. I go on to argue
that the most promising horn to take is the "no problem for
either." The core of the argument is that there is good reason
to think at least some compatibilist accounts have a
satisfactory answer to the Luck Problem, and that
(surprisingly) many libertarian accounts can help themselves
to that solution.

"Revisionist Accounts of Free
Will: Origins, Varieties, and Challenges" in The Oxford Handbook on Free
Will, 2nd edition (2011). This paper presents a brand-spankin' new
account of what revisionism about free will is, how it is
different from compatibilism and incompatibilism, and what it
comes to. It departs in important ways from my previous
characterizations of revisionism, given in “The Revisionist’s
Guide to Responsibility” (2005) and Four Views on Free Will (2007), and it
contains (to my mind) numerous improvement over those
presentations of the idea of revisionism. It also traces some
of the recent history of the development of revisionist
accounts, and outlines some ongoing challenges to revisionist
accounts.

"On the Value of Philosophy: The
Latin American Case" in Comparative
Philosophy Vol 1.1 (2010). There is very little study of Latin American
Philosophy in the English-speaking philosophical world. This
can sometimes lead to the impression that there is nothing of
philosophical worth in Latin American philosophy or its
history. This paper offers some reasons for thinking that this
impression is mistaken. In particular, the article argues for
three things: (1) an account of cultural resources that is
useful for illuminating the fact of cultural differences and
the existence of differences in cultural complexity, (2) a
framework for understanding the value of philosophy, and (3)
the conclusion that there is demonstrable value to Latin
American philosophy and its study.

"Responsibility in
a World of Causes" in Philosophic
Exchange 40 (2010): 56-78. There is a familiar chain of reasoning that
goes something like this: if everything is caused, no one is
free, and thus, no one can be morally responsible. Reasoning
like this has made scientific explanations of human behavior
(e.g., biology, psychology, and neuroscience) threatening to
familiar ideas of responsibility, blameworthiness, and merit.
Rather than directly attacking the chain of reasoning that
gives rise to these worries, I explore an alternative
approach, one that begins by considering the "use" of moral
responsibility. What role does the concept play for us? What
structure, if any, would an ideal set of practices and
attitudes about moral responsibility have to it? I outline a
new account of responsibility and consider what it might mean
for traditional worries about causal, scientific explanations
of human behavior.

"Reasons and Real Selves" in Ideas y Valores: Revista Colombiana de
Filosofía (2009). Most accounts of responsibility begin from
either of two prominent points of departure: the idea that an
agent must have some characterological or expressive
connection to the action, or alternately, the idea that an
agent must be in some sense responsive to reasons. Indeed, we
might even understand much of the past couple of decades of
philosophical work on moral responsibility as concerned with
investigating which of these two approaches offers the most
viable account of moral responsibility. Here, I wish to
revisit an idea basic to all of this work. That is, I consider
whether there is even a fundamental distinction between these
approaches. I will argue that the relationship between these
two approaches to moral responsibility is much more
complicated than is ordinarily assumed. I shall argue that
there are reasons to think that one of these views may
ultimately collapse into the other, and if not, that there is
nevertheless reason to think one of these views has
misidentified the features of agency relevant to moral
responsibility. The view that follows is one that we might
call the primacy of reasons. In the second half of the article
I consider whether recent experimental work speaks in favor of
the alternative to the primacy of reasons. Its proponents
argue that it does. I argue that it does not.

"The Revisionist Turn: A Brief
History of Work on Free Will" in New Waves in Philosophy of Action Ed. by
Aguilar, Buckareff, Frakish (2011), 143-172. Over the past 40 years there have been a number
of important changes in the literature on free will. This
article discusses some of those changes, their significance,
and their connection to broader issues in philosophy. Among
the central topics of this account are: (1) the rise of
"responsibility-centrism," (2) the role of intuitions and
disagreements concerning methodology, and (3) confusions
introduced by shifting terminology. The article concludes
by considering the place of moderate revisionism in the
context of these changes, including its distinctiveness as an
alternative to other existing accounts of free will and moral
responsbility.

"Revisionism about Free Will: A
Statement and Defense" in Philosophical Studies 144.1 (2009): 45-62. This article summarizes the moderate
revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to
objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk
Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of
the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is,
and how it is different from compatibilism and hard
incompatibilism, (2) an objection to the distinctiveness of
semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism,
and (3) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism
about moral responsibility.

"Review Essay: Taking the Highway
on Skepticism, Luck, and the Value of Responsibility" in Journal of Moral Philosophy
6.2 (2009), 249-265. I consider some themes and issues arising in
recent work on moral responsibility, focusing on three recent
books —Carlos Moya's Moral
Responsibility, Al Mele's Free Will and Luck, and John Martin
Fischer's My Way.
I argue that these texts collectively suggest some
difficulties with the way in which many issues are currently
framed in the free will debates, including disputes about what
constitutes compatibilism and incompatibilism and the
relevance of intuitions and ordinary language for describing
the metaphysics of free will and moral responsibility. I also
argue that each of the accounts raise more particular puzzles:
it is unclear to what extent Moya’s account is properly an
account of free will; Mele’s account raises questions about
the significance of luck for compatibilist theories; and
Fischer’s account of the value of responsibility as
self-expression raises questions about the normative
significance of moral responsibility.

"Real Philosophy, Metaphilosophy,
Metametaphilosophy: On the Plight of Latin American
Philosophy" in CR: The
New Centennial Review, Vol. 7.3 (2007): 51-78 This is an essay on philosophical methodology,
the disciplinary prejudices of the Anglophone philosophical
world, and how these things interact with some aspects of the
content and form of Latin American philosophy to preclude the
latter's integration with mainstream Anglophone philosophical
work. Among the topics discussed of interest to analytic
philosophers: metaphilosophy, the status hierarchy of
philosophical subfields, experimental philosophy, and patterns
of openness and exclusion in philosophy. Among the topics of
interest to philosophers interested in Latin American
philosophy and comparative philosophy: the nature of disputes
about the existence of Latin American philosophy, the
significance of this genre of writing, how contributions to it
can proceed, and why metaphilosophical concerns in Latin
America are problematic for the prospects for integration with
the Anglophone philosophical world.

"Moral
Influence, Moral Responsibility" inEssays on Free Will and Moral
Responsibility, ed. by Trakkis and
Cohen. (2008): 90-122. The traditional consequentialist model of
responsibility holds that praise and blame are forward-looking
attempts to influence agents in socially desirable ways. On
this account praise and blame derive their justification from
their efficacy at facilitating desirable outcomes. The
consensus⎯ and it is virtually unanimous among philosophers of
free will and moral responsibility⎯ is that moral influence
theories have little to offer in the way of an adequate theory
of moral responsibility. In this paper, I aim to identify an
important insight that rests at the core of traditional moral
influence theories, and to develop that insight in a way that
sidesteps the traditional objections directed against these
accounts. The insight I aim to make use of is roughly this:
the justification of our praising and blaming practices
derive, at least in part, from their effects on creatures like
us. The appeal of this justificatory strategy is that, if it
works, it provides a way to justify our
responsibility-characteristic practices in a way not dependent
on traditional debates about the metaphysics of free will and
responsible agency.

"The Trouble with Tracing"
in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29.1 (2005): 269-291.Many prominent theories of
moral responsibility rely on the notion of “tracing,”
the idea that responsibility for an outcome can be
located in (i.e., “traced back to”) some prior moment of
control, perhaps significantly antecedent to the
proximate sources of a considered action. In this
article, I show how there is a problem for theories that
rely on tracing. The problem is connected to the
knowledge condition on moral responsibility. Many prima
facie good candidate cases for tracing analyses appear
to violate the knowledge condition on moral
responsibility. So, either we need to dispense with
tracing approaches or we must refine our understanding
of the knowledge condition or we are responsible less
frequently than we suppose.

"Philosophy and the Folk: On Some Implications of Experimental
Work for Philosophical Debates about Free Will" Jnl of Cogn
& Cult 6.1-2 (2006): 239-254.
I discuss experimental work by Nichols, and Nichols and Knobe,
with respect to the philosophical problems of free will and
moral responsibility. I mention some methodological concerns
about the work, but focus principally on the philosophical
implications of the work. The experimental results seem to show
that in particular, concrete cases we are more willing to
attribute responsibility than in cases described abstractly or
in general terms. I argue that their results suggest a deep
problem for traditional accounts of compatibilism, and that they
may cast some light on the literature surrounding Frankfurt
cases. I also suggest a way in which mature philosophical
convictions about free will may reflect a contingent process of
refining and defending either of two competing strands of
intuitions, and suggest that this may partly explain the
persistence of philosophical debates about free will.

"On
the
Importance of History for Responsible Agency" in Philosophical Studies
(2006)In this
article I propose a resolution to the
history issue for responsible agency, given
a moderate revisionistapproach
to responsibility.Roughly,
moderate revisionism is the view that a plausible and
normatively adequate theory of responsibility will
require principled departures from commonsense
thinking. The history issue is whether morally
responsible agency — that is, whether an agent is an
apt target of our responsibility-characteristic
practices and attitudes— is an essentially historical
notion. Some have maintained that responsible agents
must have particular sorts of histories, others have
argued that no such history is required. Resolution of
this contentious issue is connected to a wide range of
concerns, including the significance and culpability
of different forms of manipulation, the plausibility
of important incompatibilist criticisms of
compatibilism, and of course, a satisfactory account
of moral responsibility. As it turns out, history
matters sometimes, but less frequently than we might
think.

"The
Revisionist's Guide to Responsibility" in Philosophical Studies
127.3 (2005): 351-382. [NB: I now take the account of revisionism in
this paper to be superseded by the account offered in "Revisionist Accounts of Free
Will: Origins, Varieties, and Challenges"]Revisionism in the theory of moral
responsibility is the idea that some aspect of responsibility
practices, attitudes, or concept is in need of revision. While
the increased frequency of revisionist language in the
literature on free will and moral responsibility is striking,
what discussion there has been of revisionism about
responsibility and free will tends to be critical. In this
paper, I argue that at least one species of revisionism,
moderate revisionism, is considerably more sophisticated and
defensible than critics have realized. I go on to argue for
the advantages of moderate revisionist theories over standard
compatibilist and incompatibilist theories.

Standard models
of practical rationality face a puzzle that has gone
unnoticed: given a modest assumption about the nature of
deliberation, we are apparently frequently briefly irrational.
I explain the problem, consider what is wrong with several
possible solutions, and propose an account that does not
generate the objectionable result.

Proponents of
the philosophy of liberation generally counsel that various
forms of liberation in at least the Americas requires that we
should fight Eurocentrism and resist the ontology and
conceptual framework of Europe. However, most of the work done
in this tradition relies heavily on the terminology and
theoretical apparatus of various strands of European
philosophy. The apparent disconnect between the aims and
methods (or if you like, the theory and practice) has given
rise to a criticism I call The Eurocentrism Problem. I
argue that the Eurocentrism Problem has not received an
adequate reply, and that it reflects a number of underlying
flaws in the philosophical program of the philosophy of
liberation. These problems can largely be avoided if we
significantly recast the philosophy of liberation, eliminating
its reliance on the conceptual foundations provided by
Levinas, Heidegger, and so on.

I examine the
extent to which Dennett's account in Freedom Evolves
might be construed as a revisionist about free will, and
whether we should instead understand him as a more traditional
kind of compatibilist. I argue that despite some strands of
his work that suggest otherwise, Dennett's view is properly
is, to its detriment, intended as a form of non-revisionist
compatibilism. I also consider his views about philosophical
work on free agency and its relationship to scientific
inquiry, and I argue that extant philosophical work is more
relevant to scientific inquiry that Dennett's remarks may
suggest.

Strawsonian
approaches to responsibility, including more recent accounts
such as Dennett's and Wallace's, face a number of important
objections. However, Strawsonian theories can be recast along
revisionist lines so as to avoid many of these problems. In
this paper, I explain the revisionist approach to moral
responsibility, discuss the concessions it makes to
incompatibilism (including the point that compatibilists may
not fully capture our commonsense understanding of
responsibility), why it provides a fruitful recasting of
Strawsonian approaches, and how it offers an alternative to
the pattern of dialectical stalemates exhibited by standard
approaches to free will and determinism.

In this paper I criticize
libertarianism and skepticism about free will. The
criticism of libertarianism takes some steps towards
filling in an argument that is often mentioned but
seldom developed in any detail, the argument that
libertarianism is a scientifically implausible view. I
say "take some steps" because I think the considerations
I muster (at most) favor a less ambitious relative of
that argument. The less ambitious claim I hope to
motivate is that there is little reason to believe that
extant libertarian accounts satisfy a standard of
naturalistic plausibility, even if they do satisfy a
standard of naturalistic compatibility. The argument
against skepticism about free will tries to show (1)
perhaps the most prominent form of skeptical argument
against the existence of free will does not work, and
(2) there is a good general argument against skepticism
about free will.